ALAN TURING AND HIS IMPACT ON SOCIETY
“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”
RESULTS OF AN INQUEST ON ALAN TURING
In order to know more about Alan Turing's fame amongst young people, we made a google form which we sent to the middle and high school students of our school. In total, we had over 110 answers to the inquest and are therefore in order to establish an average answer on whether or not people know Turing as we had learnt in math that, if we have 30 results, we can generalize them into results for the whole population.
Here are the results we obtained from this inquest:
DO YOU KNOW ALAN TURING ?
DO YOU KNOW WHAT CRYPTOGRAPHY
IS ?
DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE ENIGMA MACHINE IS ?
HOW DO YOU KNOW ALAN TURING ?
WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT TURING ?
WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ENIGMA ?
WHAT IMPACT DO YOU CONSIDER TURING HAD ON THE WAR ?
DO YOU THINK TURING WAS RECOGNIZED FOR HIS ACTIONS/ DISCOVERIES ?
ANALYSIS OF OUR RESULTS
As we can see in the first pie chart, more than 50% of the people who answered the google form do not know about Alan Turing and about 17% only know him by name. This result surprised us as we did not realize that Alan Turing was so unknown to children from 12 to 18 years old. This indeed makes our problématique and subject valid as our goal doing this project was to get people to learn more about Alan Turing. At least, the 51% who did not know about him now have heard his name, which will perhaps drive them to research more facts about him.
However, what we found very interesting was the clear impact that the movie "The Imitation Game" had, as more than 20 out of the 67 people who answered this question have heard about him by watching this movie.
As we can also see, only a little amount of people have studied Alan Turing in class, perhaps meaning that learning about him in school could be a part of the program.
As well, more or less 48% people do not know about the Enigma machine, which also surprised us as it is one of the things that helped the Allies win WWII.
Most importantly, a vast majority of people answered either that he had a big impact on the outcome of WWII or that they had no idea.
Therefore, it felt strange to us that practically everyone said that Turing had a big impact on the outcome of WWII when such a few peolpe know about him. This inquest shows us that Alan Turing should be spoken about, given the fact that many people believe he had a big impact on the War, which is proven to be true.